Dec 29, 2008

World - Samuel Huntington is dead

BOSTON: Samuel Huntington, a political scientist best known for his views on the clash of civilizations, died on Wednesday on Martha’s Vineyard, Harvard University announced on Saturday. He was 81.

Mr. Huntington had retired from active teaching in 2007 after 58 years at Harvard.

His research and teaching focused on American government, democratisation, military politics, strategy, and civil-military relations.

He argued that in a post-Cold War world, violent conflict would come not from ideological friction between nations, but from cultural and religious differences among the world’s major civilizations.

Thesis expanded

He identified those civilizations as Western (including the United States and Europe), Latin American, Islamic, African, Orthodox (with Russia as a core state), and Hindu, Japanese, and “Sinic” (including China, Korea, and Vietnam).

He made the argument in a 1993 article in the journal Foreign Affairs, and then expanded the thesis into a book, “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,” which was published in 1996.

The book has been translated into 39 languages.

In all, Mr. Huntington wrote 17 books.

Mr. Huntington was born on April 18, 1927, in New York City.

He received his B.A. from Yale in 1946, served in the U.S. Army, earned an M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1948, and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1951. — AP